


It Makes a Halo

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: F/F, w359bb17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 03:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13158720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: Lovelace can’t sleep. Minkowski is awake. Add a regular sleep schedule to the list of things they miss.





	It Makes a Halo

**Author's Note:**

> With art by the wonderful kindadisappointed! http://bit.ly/2ldgkhm  
> This fic is part of the 2017 Wolf 359 Big Bang.

Sometimes, nights are easy.

Those are the nights she sleeps more than three hours. Rarer and rarer. Most nights are hard anyway and she’s gotten it so the hard nights are better than the bad nights. There’s a distinction there that she doesn’t think too much about.

(Bad nights mean nightmares. Nightmares mean spatters of blood behind her eyes when she blinks. And there was _so_ _much_ _blood_ —)

Lovelace rolls over in her sleeping bag and tucks her face under her arm. It was like that on her first mission, the first mission when she was her, whatever, and it’s like that now. The nothing-ness. The way nothing ever changes. The star, the station, the sleep schedule, the trying not to die, the way the weird light gets in everything and never ever leaves—

Lovelace struggles out of her sleeping bag, kicking it away.

The hallways are silent, except for the soft hum that always drifts through the walls. It’s never quiet up here, either. Lovelace kicks off the walls, sending herself soaring through the half-darkness. She picks up speed, swings around a corner and pulls herself down the hall. It feels real to move like that. Space isn’t kinetic but she is, has always been. There could almost be wind in her hair.

She reaches the bridge in minutes. The door is propped open, as usual. Inside, Minkowski is in the captain’s chair, silhouetted in the glow of the console. She’s humming something, but she stops when Lovelace pushes the door open.

“Hard night?” Minkowski says without turning around.

The tension in her back is half gone already, just being in the same room as Renée Minkowski. “Yeah.” Lovelace pushes off the door and drifts toward Minkowski, catching herself on the back of the co-captain’s chair. She sits, folds her arms around herself. Minkowski doesn’t say anything else. Maybe she’s used to it by now, how Lovelace finds her way to her on late nights.

Anyway. Most of the time it’s enough to just share space with Minkowski, but Lovelace can’t take the quiet tonight. “Anything going on?” she asks, just missing nonchalance.

Minkowski glances toward the control panels. Her eyes move the way they have for months and months. “Hera’s still in the middle of her debugging cycle. Everything’s nominal.”

“For once.”

“Yeah.” Minkowski looks across at her, and there is something in her face that makes Lovelace’s chest ache, but hell if she can put a name to it. In the starlight, Minkowski looks like an angel, avenging, honorable, weary. Her hair is loose around her face— it’s grown out since they first met— and it makes a halo.

“What were you humming?” Lovelace asks, just for something to say. “When I came in.”

Minkowski turns her chair and stretches her legs onto Lovelace’s. Her arms are uncrossed. “Don’t laugh.”

“All right.”

Minkowski says, “It’s from Wicked.”

“Saw that on Broadway.”

Minkowski gasps. “It was presented much better on Broadway, but the Chicago cast really knew what they were doing with the end of the first act, and I think it deserved…” She trails off. “Sorry. You don’t care.”

“No,” Lovelace says, maybe too quickly. “No, I— it’s fine.” She fumbles, searches for worlds. “You know, I miss it.”

“Musicals?”

“No, just— lights. People.” She laughs, or tries. “How pathetic is that?”

“Things tasting good,” Minkowski says.

“What?”

“That’s what I miss. Real food. And—” she waves her hand around— “real air.”

“Dogs,” Lovelace says slowly.

“Warmth.”

“Gravity.”

“Mountains.”

“It’s never quiet,” Lovelace says. Has to say. “You’d think space would be quiet.”

Minkowski leans back in her chair. Her face has closed off but there’s still something soft around her mouth. God, she’s brave. “We get used to it.”

“No, we don’t,” Lovelace says, with well-worn bitterness.

“No,” Minkowski agrees, stretching the word into a tired sigh. “No, we don’t.”

It’s silent, then, for a long moment that feels like years— here, with Minkowski right beside her. It’s never quiet, but somehow time has stopped and Lovelace could just stay here forever with Minkowski looking at her that way.

“You know what else I miss?” Lovelace says.

Minkowski tilts her head. Their legs are still almost intertwined, holding each other in still orbit. “Do tell.”

“Knowing things are true.”

“That one’s easy,” Minkowski says.       

Lovelace scoffs. “On this station?”

“Tell me something,” Minkowski says, and her voice is low and Lovelace feels a frisson down her spine. “Something you know is true.”

“There aren’t a lot of things like that.”

“I’ll start.” Minkowski steeples her fingers. “Wolf 359 is blue.”

“It _changed_.”

“Fine. Bad example.” Her voice is still so soft. “How about… we’re in the bridge.”

Lovelace raises an eyebrow.

“Your turn,” Minkowski tells her.

“I’m here… with you.”

“We’re here together.”

Lovelace thinks of what she wants to say next, and everything stops, frozen in _what if_.

“Lovelace?”

Oh, hell. It’s as true as anything she’s ever said. “Can I kiss you?”

“That’s a question, not a statement,” Minkowski says. “Yes.”

Lovelace leans forward and Minkowski sits up fast and they meet in the middle. Minkowski’s lips are chapped but still soft as silk, and her hands on Lovelace’s shoulders are all that’s keeping Lovelace from floating away. They’re in perfect balance and when Minkowski looks her in the face and says, “Isabel Lovelace, I’ve been waiting for you to ask that for months now,” Lovelace can only laugh helplessly.

Minkowski is looking at her with light in her eyes, something brighter than the starlight and the glow of the consoles flooding the still air around them, and Lovelace tugs Minkowski closer, pulls her in and kisses her again, soft and slow even though Minkowski feels like the sun in her hands and she’s so desperate for anything like warmth. Lovelace runs her hands up Minkowski’s back, cups her face between her hands, and Minkowski sighs into her mouth.

Some things change. Some things don’t. Lovelace kisses Minkowski in the blue light of Wolf 359 and she does not feel afraid.

 

 


End file.
